by Peter Plate
An hour went by before the outlaws broke out of the forest and into a clearing. The ground had been fenced off for pasture; Spanish cattle raised their horned heads at the interlopers. Two-Fingered signed with his hands at the Ohlone. The Indian with the scars on his back pointed to a creek that ran north. Two-Fingered said to José, “We follow the agua and then in a couple of miles we get to the Mission.”
Resuming their march, the bandits proceeded to walk alongside the creek. They encountered more cows, a herd of sheep, and a gang of wild dogs. Two-Fingered Tom was taking swigs from a flask of absinthe and singing a corrido. He couldn’t wait to find the Chinamen in the village—they sold the best opium he’d ever smoked.
The march was uneventful until they saw the white walls and church tower of Mission Dolores. The settlement dated back to the 1770s and was one of the oldest in the state of California. It was ringed with corrals and outbuildings that housed the overseers and other church employees. Further off were the shanties of the Mission Indians. Small plots of corn, squash, and beans bordered the creek. Horses were grazing on burdock. A half-breed boy, naked from the waist down, spied the strangers and ran past the corrals into the cornfields.
The young Ohlone held up his hand and made the travelers get behind a ridge of serpentine—several lawmen on horseback were riding out of the compound. The horses kicked up dirt and José Reyna was hard pressed to keep from sneezing. When the horsemen had ridden down the road and into the woods, the guides led him and Two-Fingered Tom to a side gate. In front of them was a cemetery. Rose bushes climbed the adobe walls; stone grave markers were corroding in the loamy soil. The two Ohlone stopped and talked to each other in their native tongue. The older man drew a circle in the dirt with his finger and then crossed it out.
Two-Fingered Tom said to José, “He’s saying there are too many ghosts around here. Ohlone slaves are buried in that graveyard. Their spirits want out of the ground.”
Retreating into a corral, the pistoleros hid behind a bale of hay and prepared their weapons. José had an 1836 Colt Navy repeating revolver. The Ohlone carried old-fashioned flintlock pistols. Two-Fingered Tom’s adolescent face was stern under his sombrero as he said, “Orale, this has been long overdue.”
The mission’s stout wood gate opened and a man in cowboy clothes with a Sharps rifle stepped out. He was bearded and wore a cream-colored ten-gallon Stetson hat. He looked at the cemetery and at the cows by the creek. He stared at the cornfields and at the corral where the outlaws were hidden. José was sure they’d been seen. But the guard didn’t detect them and shouldered his rifle and went back inside the walls. A few minutes later a priest came out.
“That’s him,” Two-Fingered Tom exclaimed.
The brown-robe started walking down the dirt road toward the Mission lagoon. He was fat and bald with a face that was red from drink; his nose was bulbous and his mouth was thin. His leather sandals raised sprites of dust. The hem of his garment was muddy. In his right hand he clutched a staff carved from hemlock wood. Around his waist was a rope belt. From it hung a deerskin pouch.
Two-Fingered Tom said, “This is it, vatos. Watch my back.”
The outlaw, skinnier than a scarecrow, two-stepped out from behind the hay. He brushed off his leather chaps and jacket and greeted the cleric as if they were old friends. “Oye, padre, ¿qué pasa?” Extracting the flask from his jacket, Two-Fingered had a lusty pull from it and offered it to the priest. “You want some, viejo? The shit’s good for you, eh? Puts hair on your cojones.”
The brown-robe said, “Who are you, hijo?”
“I ain’t a friend, that’s all you got to know.”
A pinto pony nickered in the corral. A cow mooed in the fields. A rooster began to cock-a-doodle-doo. Two-Fingered Tom put the flask in his belt and tapped the priest on the chest with his squirrel gun. “Gimme the chingadera, that pouch you got, tu pinche gusano.”
The two Indians jumped up and pinioned the brown-robe. The younger Ohlone removed the pouch and handed it to Two-Fingered Tom. The teenaged desperado untied it and poured the contents into his palm. It was three ounces of gold dust from the mines near Mokelumne Hill.
The scarred Indian withdrew a knife from his belt and ran it over the priest’s face, testing the blade’s sharpness against the man’s white skin. José Reyna went to stop him, but his cousin held him back, saying, “No, vato. Let him do what he’s got to do.”
The Ohlone drove the blade in the brown-robe’s chest; the man’s legs kicked once, a hiss of breath escaped from his mouth, and that was it. The mockingbirds in the cedar grove next to the cemetery began to protest. Two-Fingered Tom sifted the gold dust back into the pouch and tucked it in his shirt. Disregarding the dead priest, he said to José, “Let’s go, hombre. We’ve got a lot of shit to accomplish.”
FOURTEEN
THE SIX O’CLOCK TELEVISION NEWS reported that a cache of the Brinks cash, about a hundred thousand dollars, had been recovered from under a car on Polk Street. The money, wrapped in butcher paper, had been run over several times during the day and no longer resembled hard currency. A spokeswoman for the Brinks firm claimed the sum was a miniscule percentage of what had been stolen.
The sun had taken a nosedive over the Golden Gate Bridge into the ocean. A foghorn pealed in the bay near the Marin Headlands. Fog swooped over Corona Heights. A westerly wind bent the trees on Market Street; garbage did a fandango on the sidewalk.
A hooker was working the parking lot behind the French bistro at Franklin and Market. She was youngish, about thirty-five. The rouge on her face was cracking, chipping off in flakes. Her hair, bleached bone white, frothed over a high forehead. Her emerald green eyes were slits in violet-hued mascara. She had on a red leather mini-skirt and a waist-length rabbit fur jacket. Under the skirt were two miles of bare legs. Under the jacket there was nothing at all.
The intersection at Franklin was a good spot for a girl to work. The street was one-way. The stoplight was lengthy, giving motorists and prostitutes an ample opportunity to check each other out. But the only people who consistently made use of the corner were homeless panhandlers, mostly black and white women over forty.
Mama Celeste saw the hooker and decided to introduce herself. Waddling over to the parking lot, she was wheezing and her feet were sore. Orthopedic shoes were a mistake. They didn’t do a thing to help you. She loosened the muffler from her neck, flicked a dreadlock off her face. Shivering in the army jacket, she was dressed no better than a wino. Her kinky hair was flattened under a handkerchief and a Giants baseball hat. Her ankle-high shoes had rents in them. Her stockings were past their peak. Her dress had been around since the days of the Roman Empire. Her teeth were gritty from the dirt in the street. Was she meshugge to give away the money in the shoebox? Her parents would roll over in their graves if they saw what she was doing.
The whore didn’t acknowledge the old woman. Instead she concentrated on the cars. Headlights were brilliant in the fogged out blackness and haloed her. A Jeep Cherokee skated to the curb and the driver, a twenty-something white guy in a leather bomber jacket, rolled down the window. She had a few words with him, nodded a no, and he drove off.
A spear point of loneliness tweaked Mama. Where was her husband now? Was he in heaven? Did they allow black people in there nowadays? Chances were, they did, and she’d find him waiting for her with open arms. Mama saw that she wasn’t going to get anywhere with the working girl, so when the light at the corner turned green, she gallivanted across Market Street.
A pigeon with no legs was pecking at the grass in the pavement. The bird’s feathers had clotted into clumps. Its tiny head was beleaguered with tumors. Its beak had hairline fractures in it. It schlepped along the pavement by using its wings as if they were feet. It nibbled at the scraggly grass, not liking the taste of it.
Seeing Mama Celeste walk by, the pigeon went inert. It didn’t have the energy to fly off. It was tired how Tenderloin pigeons got tired, having to dodge traffic all day long. Eatin
g trash to stay alive. Getting sprayed with pesticides by the city’s sanitation workers. Fighting other birds for turf. Keeping homeless people and tourists and cops from stepping on you. The struggle was never ending and exhausting. The pigeon couldn’t wait to find a nook or cranny to sleep in, even if it was just for a few minutes.
Mama Celeste spotted the troubled creature and regarded it with pity. The bird was a double amputee and had eyes that were almost human. She said to it, “What’s with you, all by yourself out here. You must be lonely, ha?”
The pigeon quailed when she spoke. It looked up at the old lady with a crazed, abject expression. It expected abuse and was ready for the worst. It was a ghetto bird, underprivileged and with low self-esteem.
Prying the lid off the shoebox, Mama extracted a twenty-dollar bill. Bowing from the waist, she invited the bird to take it. “For you,” she said respectfully. “It’s all I have. The money might do you good.”
The pigeon gave Mama Celeste a depressive, hard-boiled glance, and then browsed over the cash. It was totally confused. Money meant nothing to a pigeon. But a gift was a gift. You couldn’t refuse it. That would be rude. And maybe dumb. You never knew. Upright on its leg stumps, the pigeon took the twenty from Mama’s fingers. It trilled once, spread its balding wings, and flew away with the Andrew Jackson in its beak.
Mama Celeste watched the legless pigeon sweep over the rooftops and then resumed her pilgrimage up Market Street. The white neon cross on the First Baptist Church was a beacon in the fog. An overturned turquoise-blue Ford Fiesta with no doors was ablaze next to Martuni’s Lounge. Green and gold dragonflies rode the currents around the burning car; the stench of deliquescent plastic was a tight fitting glove on the street.
Night had fallen on forty thousand homeless people, the vacant office buildings on Market Street, the clock tower at the Embarcadero, and the icy black-green waters in the San Francisco Bay.
Richard Rood trailed Mama Celeste, keeping his distance. A lone one-hundred-dollar bill was suspended from the woman’s coat sleeve. A Ulysses S. Grant was stuck on her collar. She was leaving a line of twenty-dollar bills on the ground behind her. Richard was scooping them up as he walked. “The sister is a fucking whack-o,” he said to himself. “She’s out of her damn tree.”
A hag such as Mama Celeste was an automatic victim in his book. In the food chain of crime, she was a target. She was ripe for the plucking. But she had given him money with no strings attached. Nobody had ever done anything like that for Richard and he had to return the favor. His code of honor demanded payback. It was a complicated twist of fate. He couldn’t rob her. He couldn’t steal her cash. He had to protect her.
The third man Richard Rood killed had been at the Expansion Bar, a working-class tavern off Church Street. An NBA playoff basketball game was on the television and the patrons were watching it. Richard had gotten himself a stool and was in the act of sitting down. Someone tap-tapped him on the shoulder, hard enough to put him on the alert. He turned around to find a drunken white guy with a beard. The dude was apoplectic; his skin was tomato red. He said to Richard, “That’s my old lady’s chair, you dick. You took it from her.”
Richard was congenial, seeing that the white man was angry. He removed his hindquarters from the stool and said, “No problem, cool breeze. She can take it. Have a nice day.”
The drunk clutched the seat and walked away, saying, “Fucking queer.”
Pulling out a knife, a cheesy Mexican-made sticker, Richard jammed it in the guy’s neck until only the handle was visible. He must have nicked an artery because a fountain of blood bloomed on his victim’s shirt. The fellow fell to the floor and his girlfriend caterwauled. The bartender got on the phone to call the police. Richard said adios without causing any further commotion.
The old black lady with the money needed a guardian angel. Out here in the street with these lunatics running around—people would kill you for a cigarette—there was no telling what might happen to her. Pushing through the fog to the Allen Hotel, Richard Rood swore an oath. Not only was he going to kick Stiv Wilkins’s ass into kingdom come, he’d murder anyone that tried to run off with the biddy’s shoebox. He smiled from the bottom of his soul. The vow, complete with the threat of mayhem, made him happier than he’d been all day.
Mama Celeste and then Richard Rood passed the ghost of the poet Jack Micheline on Market Street. Hunching over a tailor-made cigarette, Micheline’s white hair riffled in the wind. His cargo jacket was zipped to the neck. His khaki trousers were slung low on his hips. His shoes were dusty. His smooth-shaven skin was slick with beads of perspiration. He extracted a kitchen match from his jacket, ignited the match’s tip with his thumbnail, and drew the flame over the fag’s tip. His profile threw an enormous silhouette on the wall behind him. The shine in his brown eyes came not from him, but from a lone streetlight. He sucked furiously on the fag, taking quick tokes while planning how to get to his room at the Civic Center Hotel on Twelfth Street.
Though his friend Jack Kerouac achieved greater fame, there was a period during the 1950s when Jack Micheline was better known in underground literary circles. In later years, unwilling to capitalize on the hype of the Beat Generation, he stayed in a series of SRO hotels before dying in 1998.
Restaurant seekers clogged the pavement and made it impossible for Jack Micheline to walk. Throngs of well-dressed middle-class young women and men blocked his path. Nobody noticed him—ghosts were difficult to see in the dark. He mooched against a chain-link fence and smoked and watched the street. He observed the drunks sleepwalking out of the Zuni Café. He saw the television transmission tower in the mists on Twin Peaks. A fragment of a poem tiptoed through his leonine head and he chased after it. He wasn’t in any hurry to find it. The night was long and he had all the time in the universe.
The Brinks dough had been missing for thirteen hours.
FIFTEEN
AN EXHAUSTED STIV WILKINS found a bench under a dwarf palm tree in Dolores Park and sprawled on it. The park sat on a hill and commanded an excellent view of the city. The only things Stiv recognized in the skyline were the General Hospital and the jail at the Hall of Justice on 850 Bryant Street. The mean-spirited felony tank windows were discernible from miles away.
On the other side of the park were the copper-faceted dome of the Second Church of Christ, Scientist, and a row of apartment houses. One of the buildings had been the home of Emma Goldman, the Russian-born anarchist orator and writer. In the summer of 1916 she was taken to jail after the arrests of Warren Billings and Tom Mooney. Later she was deported to Russia in the aftermath of the Palmer Raids of 1919.
Stiv’s half a year in the city prison had been enough. Eating baloney sandwiches three times a day—the dogs on death row at the SPCA had a better diet. Wiping your privates with last week’s newspapers on a broken toilet. Sleeping with one eye open to make sure a cellmate didn’t steal your shoes. Taking a shower once a week with ten other guys. Stiv had outgrown the routine.
Unearthing an overripe orange from his pants, a memento from a restaurant dumpster, Stiv peeled the fruit with his switchblade and ate it. He rearranged the Colt revolver in his belt and put the knife back in his boot. Then he doffed his motorcycle jacket, rolled it into a pillow, and stretched out on the bench.
He’d fucked up at the post office, which had been predictable. Robbery had never been his forte. Neither was using or selling guns. But the real issue was this: What was he good at? He was twenty-five years old with no job or nothing. So what was wrong with him? Maybe he just wasn’t meant for great things. It was hard to accept that. He had dreams, little ones.
The highlight of Stiv’s career had been his band’s last show at a club on Geary Street. The venue was a deconsecrated synagogue with stained glass windows and a hardwood dance floor that could hold a thousand people. Before that it was the former headquarters of the People’s Temple, the church founded by Jim Jones, the charismatic preacher who’d led his flock into mass suicide in Guyan
a.
Stiv had been drunk on vodka because he was self-conscious, and speeding on crystal for the energy. He was shirtless and had slashed himself in the chest with a broken Budweiser beer bottle. The microphone was in his mouth; the cord was tied around his neck. He was screeching at the top of his lungs, trying to hear himself over the guitars, the feedback, the drummer who wasn’t keeping time, and the bass that threatened to blow out the monitors.
The lead guitarist went into a repetitive one-note solo that ended when he broke a string and smashed his Gibson against an amplifier—the guitar’s neck splintered and Stiv caught a sliver in the thigh. All the kids roared at the sight of his blood. Holding the mike stand over his head, he flung it into the crowd. Other kids were climbing onto the stage; a fan had his arms around Stiv’s boots and was kissing them.
Maybe he had something to offer the world. If a moth could turn into a butterfly, he could too. And, he mimicked himself, if he lived long enough, Norbert Deflass would put him back on Haldol. San Francisco had thousands of crazy people in the streets. California had closed a large percentage of its mental institutions in the 1970s and the city had become an open-air insane asylum. But that wasn’t going to be Stiv’s fate. “No way,” he vowed.
It was a false promise. With a hallucination’s unrelenting logic, Stiv Wilkins was slowly divided in two. His body was moored to the bench, but his spirit zipped out of his head in a slew of unfamiliar voices and he fainted.
Beating a retreat from the brown-robe’s corpse, José Reyna and Two-Fingered Tom and the two Ohlone walked into a stand of Ponderosa pine. Skirting the Dolores lagoon, a marshy body of water that several creeks bled into, they evaded a quartet of Indian slaves fishing on the shore.
